POEM: Tower of Babble

There are two things that frighten me –
sex and dying.

Although both offer a peculiar beauty,
I’m afraid of the process of dying, and the state of not existing,
in the same way that it unnerves me the control and power sex wields
and its ability to blemish and erode

Sometimes, as I stand on this bridge overlooking the motorway,
leaning against its railings with my eyes shut, battered by the surge of a biting
wind whistling in my ears and clawing my skin like a fearless feline,
I wonder what would happen if I jumped –
leapt over the iron barriers and became a ‘jumper’?

I imagine I’m on a trampoline, bouncing high, higher
ready to spring off into the swirling abyss,
but I can’t grasp it, what it might be like to no longer be
this flesh wrapped around sinew and bones,
arranged to form the DNA that is me,
this shell which over time
is destined to perish

then I think of the ladybird and how it scuttled
up the length of my arm; the plasticine I moulded
into a heart or a shape resembling a ginger bread man;
my first kiss with a boy called Ellis at an end-of-year school disco
when I thought no one would propose – but he did ask me for a dance,
I said ‘yes’ and at the end he kissed me. I remember he tasted of liquorice...

to choose the abyss would be to erase all these memories
and that scares the hell out of me, because doesn’t the sum of our memories define us?
Who am I without these details – the gorgeous, the grubby, the gaudy?
Each experience: a stitch that is part of the grand design that is my life...

I will stop being me, and yet there are things that make me ponder about dying.
Is there an art to death? Will the angels break my fall as I imagine they would have done if Jesus had taken up Lucifer’s challenge and flung his weight off a precipice? Would they catch me or let me land in a s-p-l-a-t on the ground, watch as my blood is given over to the soil.

Dog to dust...
Ass to ashes...

Life begins the cycle of dying,
all the cups of peppermint and fennel tea
I’ve consumed; all the rows with my father whose hurts
squeezed the joy out of my innards; the prank I played when I covered
Dan’s entire room with old newspapers; the time I sprained
my ankle and was out of action for six weeks; the sexual encounters I’ve indulged in (I once read that sex is a metaphor for death) – all to come to a nought on this bridge...

The people I wished I’d known: the burly man with the beard
and eyes that smiled at me as our gazes met across Kings Cross escalators;
the larger-than-life waitress who served me a mocha at the Starbucks
in Ladbroke Grove; the youth who picked up a fiver that had escaped my handbag
and fluttered to the floor of the corner shop in Wood Green;
the pensioner who held my hand in hers at St James Church boasting a wafer-thin smile...

so many missed opportunities to give more meaning to a life gone sour

the confusion of the Tower of Babel,
the babble in my tower is confusing me
as I contemplate if there is life after death?


Catherine Mark